I love this work by the London-based illustrator Evgenia Barinova. Originally from Russia, Evgenia moved to the UK a few years ago to complete the final year of an illustration course. Her geometric illustrations are really beautiful and I love the subtle use of texture in what she draws.

The way in which she draws figures is also something which I totally love. Their strange and heavy proportions give them real character and personality and their soft shapes really contrasts nicely against the sharp environments that they exist in. Evgenia has a large amount of great work in her portfolio which you should definitely go check out.

Murmure is a four person creative agency based out of Caen, France who are doing some really interesting work. One thing that caught my eye from their website was these concrete business cards they created for themselves. More and more frequently business cards seem to be a byproduct of the past, so it’s almost like a tongue-in-cheek joke that they’d make a business card of what’s nearly stone. I also think it’s pretty great that each one comes in it’s own tiny box. If I were handed one of these business cards I would never forget about Murmure, but I’d also proudly display their card on a shelf.

At this point I think making extraordinary art with simple objects should be it’s own category here on TFIB. Johan Rijpma has taken rolls of tape and turned them into living, moving pieces of art thanks to some extremely clever video editing. I’m not sure how he was able to keep so many rolls of tape from unfurling before they should, but he’s allowed gravity to do it’s job and captured the results in a fantastic way. I was so curious to know a bit of the process of how he did this, and thankfully he spoke a bit about it in the comments of the video.

I worked on this project for about 6 months. I tried many different compositions and then made a selection. A single composition could take more than 12 hours to develop/breakdown. (the spinning of the plate was done by hand, turning the plate about 0,4 degree’s every 30 seconds, this meant I was standing in the wind and the rain for hours watching the tape “grow” and watching the sun come up/go down)

Johan’s dedication has definitely paid off, I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

These photos by Andrew McGibbon of horses in motion from his series All The Wild Horses are some of the coolest images I’ve ever seen. He’s able to capture an emotion in all of them, you can see it in their eyes. Kyle and I talk about our dog in the same way, she looks like she has “people eyes”, and so do all of these beautiful horses. In his own words:

Painstakingly lit, this body of work is about the horse itself to which we all feel a connection, whether it’s obvious or deep down in our collective subconscious. These is a sense of awe that this beast inspires in each and everyone of us.

We can only hope that he releases a book of these photos so I can pour over the detail and nuance of each of these. I only pasted 3 images but there have to be at least 20 to 30 on his website, which you can see by clicking here.

This is the NaCl house designed by David Jameson– a house inspired by, as the name suggests, salt. Specifically, the architect cites the “natural isometric formation of mineral rock salt” which chemists and geologists call halite. The architect breaks up the mass of the house to resemble these naturally-occurring chunks of salt, disguising the horizontal layers of rooms with boxy volumes that jaunt away from each other.

When I see projects like this I always enjoy trying to match up the plan with images from the interior and exterior. Where was the photographer standing when he took this picture? Is that a window into a bathroom or closet? Because the project is relatively small, it’s not as complicated as it look (even though all the white corners can start to look the same). To continue the architect’s analogy, most salt looks the same to me, too.

It’s abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning’s birthday today, he would be 108 today. The New York Times last year took a look at Seven Eras of Willem de Kooning in honor of his retrospective at the MoMA. It’s a great way to learn more about de Kooning as there’s audio and interactive graphics.

Curated by Alyssa Nassner and Bryan Ische, Pokemon Battle Royale challenged 151 designers and illustrators to make original art inspired by the 151 original Pokemon. I’m still a fon of Pokemon and use the phrase “Pokemon evolution” to describe so many things, so I think this is a wonderful idea for an art show. There are even prints available for a lot of the pieces.

I’ve seen photographs of Elmgreen and Dragset’s ‘Prada Marfa’ before. They’re the sort of strange and surreal images that often show up context-free on the likes of Ffffound and Tumblr (and even Google Street View). As a building, it looks as though it shouldn’t exist – it’s as if the whole thing had just been photoshopped into existence. Yet it’s real. Despite having seen it many times before, it’s only recently that I’ve taken the time to discover the context of the work and who made it.

Built in 2005 near the West Texan towns of Valentine and Marfa, ‘Prada Marfa’ is a permanent sculpture created by artist-collaborators Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Masquerading as a Prada mini-boutique, the sculpture’s door is in fact non-functioning. Instead the building is intended to never be used and never repaired. For the artists, the hope is that over time, the piece will slowly degrade back into the natural landscape.

Despite this “master-plan”, the artists had to briefly deviate when, just three days after it was completed, vandals broke into it, stole some bags and graffitied the exterior. Wikipedia describes the incident best:

A few days after Prada Marfa was officially revealed, the installation was vandalized. The building was broken into and all of its contents (six handbags and 14 right footed shoes) were stolen, and the word “Dumb” and the phrase “Dum Dum” were spray painted on the sides of the structure. The sculpture was quickly repaired, repainted, and restocked. The new Prada purses do not have bottoms and instead hide parts of a security system that alerts authorities if the bags are moved

This is only one of a number of great(?) stories about the installation. In late-2009 the New York Times writer Daphne Beal was passing through the isolated stretch of Highway 90 when she stopped by the installation. For her, the work’s punch-line felt a little pat, yet when she discovered a series of business cards lined up along a ledge at the bottom of the installation she couldn’t help but feel a strangely moved. “The idea of so many people passing through” she said “was strangely moving”. For Beal there was something special about all these people who passed by and wanted to prove they were there.

You can take what you will from Elmgreen and Dragset’s installation – from the stories above it’s clear that people already have. Personally I think it’s an interesting and unique piece of art. Standing on it’s own, this Prada shop is isolated from its usual urban surroundings. Elmgreen and Dragset have taken a symbol of luxury and juxtaposed it with the romantic landscape of the Texan desert. It’s a surreal and jarringly image, and one which is filled with a dry sense of irony and a strange sense of odd isolation.